Mission: Improbable

So now the search begins for fortune cookies that serve my nefarious purposes. Unfortunately, my first acquisition is a considerable failure. The LaChoy brand fortune cookies bought at the local grocery store were inexpensive but unsuited for my designs. The box costs $1.50 and twelve cookies came in the box, so each cookie ran $0.125 each, much cheaper than a colorful die but usable only once. The other good news is that consuming the cookies during gameplay won't accelerate negative health consequences. These are the blurry stats on fortune cookies (yes, plural - a serving size is five cookies for some reason):

Once open, the message inside reveals naught but a cheerful fortune. No numbers or vocabulary of any sort. Presumably LaChoy does not want to be held financially liable when their lotto numbers fail to make you a millionaire. But this fruitless battle is just the first in a long campaign. The future awaits!

Forward to victory!

~ Adm. Wolff ~

Two Paths Diverge

One knack that makes humans so endearing is our inquisitive nature. My mind constantly roils with "what if?" ideas about my own lifetime or actual momentous events. Earlier today I was wondering if "Titanic" had made its original summer release date in 1997, would it have subsequently flopped like a landed mackerel?

Towards the end of WWII, the USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine just after delivering the components & fuel for the atomic bomb named Little Boy. The successful delivery of both atomic bombs before that catastrophe allowed the United States to annihilate two cities and demolish any remaining Japanese resolve to fight. Japanese surrender precluded involvement by the Soviet Union, which had already begun moving assets across the country to engage along the Pacific Ocean. What if the Indianapolis had been torpedoed before reaching its destination?

This change marks the divergent point for my universe. Eventually my speculations encompassed a broader question: what if the Cold War extended across the Pacific as the Iron Curtain bisects the Japanese islands?

The hallmark of acceptance is plausibility and verisimilitude helps immensely. In constructing my alternate timeline, I kept the following facts in mind.

First off, Japan loses World War Two. Even without the demoralizing display of nuclear annihilation, Japan had few remaining resources with which to fight. Japan had no reserves of oil or fuel for their navy, and many otherwise battle-ready ships were stranded in foreign ports. Even waves of kamikaze fighters was not viable defense defense option - the combined US & Australian navies had ten times number of watercraft than the Japanese had operational airplanes left in 1945.

Nonetheless, while victory was out of reach, the Japanese military was convinced that a protracted war in the Pacific would be unpopular with a war-weary American population. Could the Japanese population fight desperately and successfully enough to repel invaders until elections in the States in 1946 or even the presidential contest in 1948? Could popular opinion shift at home now that Hitler was vanquished?

In the closing days of WWII, United States military forces prepared to unleash a new weapon on the unbowed Japanese nation: the atomic bomb. The Army Air Force flew the components & nuclear fuel for the Fat Man to Tinian Island, leaving Kirkland Army Air Field on 26 July 1945 and arriving two days later. The Navy was responsible for delivering Little Boy. The fissionable uranium & unassembled components were stowed on the USS Indianapolis (CA-35), which left San Francisco on 16 July 1945. The ship reached Pearl Harbor on 19 July and left for Tinian to arrive a week later. The heavy cruiser was sunk en route by a Japanese submarine. With only one nuclear weapon in its arsenal, the US military refrained from using the remaining atomic weapon to force the capitulation of the Japanese government.

Map from CIA World Factbook

The Manhattan project had always remained secret to all but the upper echelons of the military, and even among this cabal, the efficacy of these new weapons was dubious. At the beginning of August 1945, the decision was made to hold Fat Man in reserve on Tinian Island. Instead, the United States military moved ahead with plans to finish the war in a more traditional fashion: invasion.

Planning on Operation Downfall began back in 1943 and had been updated and refined over the intervening months. Operation Downfall was the umbrella designation for two separate invasions of the Japanese Islands by US forces: Olympic & Coronet.

The Olympic invasion would take place in November 1945 on X-Day. The amphibious forces would land on Kyushu and establish a foothold where US air assets could land on the southern part of the island. The goal of Olympic was neither secure the whole island or begin moving troops north onto Honshu. Instead, once enough of the island was controlled and airfields established, Operation Coronet would begin.

Initial estimates placed March 1946 as the earliest possible Y-Day when Operation Coronet would begin. With air support from Kyushu, an amphibious invasion of the coastline just south of Tokyo would take place. The goal was to seize control of the capital city and force surrender of the remaining forces.

Given the overwhelming resources of the United States at this point of the war, the invasion would succeed, but the cost in casualties would be staggering. Additionally, the delay would allow the Soviet Union to move forces from the European theatre and begin assaulting Japanese positions on Sakhalin Island and the Chinese mainland. As US forces implemented Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese islands. The Soviets conducted their invasion in two similar waves. Operation Yarosti Medved ("Angry Bear") involved two waves of troops. The first wave Mishka would land Soviet forces on the northern island of Hokkaido. The primary invasion Boris would land Soviet troops at Niigata on Honshu's west coast and drive across the middle of the island to Sendai on the east coast. Under the guise of this invasion, the Soviet forces retake territory disputed since the Russo-Japanese War of 1906. Without much resistance, the Soviets quickly occupy Sakhalin Island as well as many smaller islands northeast of Hokkaido.

As Y-Day drew to a close and American forces had establish positions near Tokyo, the American military used the Fat Man atomic bomb on Hiroshima to demoralize the population. Unwilling to postpone the inevitable, the Japanese government indicated its willingness to surrender the next day, with the official surrender taking place less than a week later. Similar to the situation in Germany, responsibility for the Japanese islands is divided, with the Soviets occupying Hokkaido & the north half of Honshu, and Allied Forces (US & Australia primarily) in control of the rest of the archipelago. 

Currently I want to set the game in 1949 - just after the first Soviet nuclear test, but before the outbreak of open warfare on the Korean Peninsula. Instead, the entire Pacific Ocean becomes a shadowy world of pirates, agents and aces with dubious loyalty to either side. Additionally, an unknown third party begins moving beneath the depths, further destabilizing any tenuous peace across the waves.

I'll delve more into this setting in the future but I wanted to include various thoughts regarding other threads that may find themselves entangled in this world.

• Do nuclear test detonations still take place across the Pacific, resulting in Lucky Dragon 5 accident in 1954?
• How is nuclear proliferation affected? Who else benefits from solving the riddle of "tickling the dragon's tail"?
• What about Sputnik & the space race? ICBMs? NASA?
• Does the Korean War still occur? What about Vietnam much later?
• Without a unified Japan, do the Philippines become the prime benefactor of US assistance? Does Cubi Point/Subic Bay become the focal point of US naval presence in Asia?
• Does Dewey defeat Truman? What becomes of Generals MacArthur & Eisenhower?
• Do the Windtalkers graduate from military operations to espionage?

May you enjoy fair seas & following winds!
~ Admiral Wolff ~

Riddle me this

This experiment is simply a grandiose expression of what I've been doing for years: writing and running RPGs for friends. I've always loved including riddles as obstacles or clues for players, and even wrote a monograph about common themes in riddles. If I find a copy of that treatise, I will definitely share it.

Regardless, I've found scribbled notes sent by my past self into the present, but lacking context or solution. Any insight is appreciated.  This first riddle was scribbled on the back of a flyer from a 2013 music festival in red crayon, making me suspect that it was conceived during a day of enjoying music & later frantically scribbled late at night with the red from a free pack of kid crayons from a Steak & Shake. The text is transcribed as best as I can read the words:

Written the same backwards and forward
Spoken, my name is a shorter word
One, two, or family people makes like 3
Black, brown, blue, green & more: what could I be?

I've got some clues on this riddle. Obviously the solution is a single word and a palindrome. The second line makes it sound like some homophone of the word in question is shorter than the answer (like 'mite' & 'might'). It's some collection of colorful items, but beyond those scant imaginings, you guess is a good as mine (and possibly better).

The other is an old email sent to myself from a now-defunct account. It scans better as a poem, but the rhyme of 'is' and 'gives' seems strange if not deliberate, which makes me suspect I've spent a great deal of time polishing it.

Beginning with something you pick up,
The answer is what it then gives
The difference is large grey less small red
Noah's companions, that is.

Anyhow, I'll leave these to befuddle you as much as they have me.

Perseverance ~ Adm. Wolff

Anatomy of a Fortune Cookie

Contrary to the implication of the title, this article is not a treatise on the form or construction of fortune cookies. The process of taking freshly-cooked circular cookies, placing paper in the middle, curling in the edges and bending the middle is a remarkable accomplishment and well worth researching. Instead, let's examine the contents of the cookie itself: the small paper fortune.

Years ago (during the last century, as a matter of fact) I noticed some peculiar themes recurring on fortune cookie fortunes. Since my childhood, cryptic guidance has always appeared on the obverse, promising future happiness, wealth or love. More recently, other features began appearing with varying frequency, usually on the fortune's reverse. The most common "DVD extra" offered is a collection of lottery numbers. These digits became an industry standard over a decade ago. Having stared at these numbers time & again, the question that kept rattling in my head was: could I use the random lotto numbers to power the skills or combat mechanics of a role-playing game (RPG)? I have an idea for using nearly every part of a fortune cookie to resolve uncertainty around story events.

Before delving deeper into that idea, let me dissect the common fortune. As mentioned before, the front always contains some generic prognostication. Apologies for the fuzzy image above, but here is a shot of some fortunes collected recently from various sources. The text on the fortunes read (from top):

• Turn your thoughts within - find yourself
• Your nurturing instincts will expand to include many people
• A friend is a present you give yourself
• A surprise treat awaits you
• Life to you is a dashing and bold adventure
• It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness
• You are attracted to things with an exotic flavor

That last fortune in red is from Panda Express/Panda Inn, so it serves as an advertisement for the chain as much as a paper predictor. Flipping the fortunes over reveals another oddity from the last specimen.

The fine folks at Panda Express don't want to be held liable for your predictably bad luck at government-sponsored gambling. That slip of paper offers no numbers at all. The others offer a variety of Lucky Numbers (once literally) that could easily apply to common lottery games of a Daily Pick 3 nature or a Multiball style drawing. The triplets shown on three of the fortunes are as follows:

Given the nature of state-sanctioned games of chance, these numbers probably allow the digits 0 through 9 with replacement (meaning that the same number could theoretically be drawn up to three times). It didn't happen on these examples, so I need to dig through my collection to see if that does occur.

These longer sets of auspicious numbers are modeled after drawings that feature a single basket of numbers 1 through an arbitrary upper limit. In this sample, the largest number is 55, but real world examples such as the Virginia Lottery use numbers up to 75 to decrease the actual chance of anyone winning the large prize.

Finally, one fortune allows you to linguistically expand your horizons; in this particular case you can learn yan: the Chinese word for salt. This miniature vocabulary lesson appears less frequently than numbers, but usually has pronunciation as well as the pictograph associated with the word.

Photo courtesy of United States Geological Survey

Based on my experience, this list shows what information can be found on a fortune by decreasing popularity:

1. Fortune
2. 6 lucky numbers (1-55? with no duplication)
3. 3 lucky numbers (0-9 w/ possible duplication)
4. Chinese vocabulary word/phrase

Each of these are randomly determined by a printer in a cookie processing company somewhere across the globe. That information remains in indeterminate form until the cookie is broken open and the paper emerges.

Best of luck ~ Adm. Wolff

Grandfather Jones

Both of my grandfathers served in the US Army during World War Two. Based on the stories I've heard, it sounds like they both volunteered and served towards the end of the war (1943-1945). My paternal grandfather was stationed exclusively in Europe, fighting on the ground after D-Day. During one engagement, his actions thwarted the advance of a German tank and saved the lives of a dozen American soldiers. He himself never mentioned this event and only years later was presented with the medal he earned that day because of the research undertaken by one of my cousins. I hope to include a transcript of that research later rather than sharing my ersatz recollections.

My maternal grandfather's story I remember well enough to recount myself.  My mother's father was a burly man with white wavy hair. In uniform, he was slimmer and his wavy hair was shorter, black, and not long enough to be wavy. During the war he picked up habits for coffee, pipes and firearms that he maintained until nearly the very end of his life

When WWII began, he worked as a traveling salesman with the Gulf Oil Company and his territory encompassed southern Georgia and north Florida. That description might sound impressive, but remember back in the day that Florida was St. Augustine west through Tampa Bay, past Tallahassee and over to Pensacola. The only large populations on the peninsula were Miami and Key West at the very south. The remainder was scrubland and swamps until NASA and the Magic Kingdom arrived in the sixties. With the war effort consuming massive resources, there was little oil or gasoline left for him to sell to the public. He signed up to fight in the Army infantry and was training in the midwest when the news came.

Apparently as the freshest member of the Allies, the United States was mobilizing the whole Western hemisphere. That meant that the US Army was training troops in nearby countries like Brazil. And in Brazil, citizens spoke Portuguese. So some IBM computer combed through the skills of the newest recruits to determine which soldiers spoke Portuguese and could serve as trainers for the nascent Brazilian infantry.

The computer spit out three names.That number was way too few to train an army.

So the generals, bureaucrats & programmers decided that "Hey, Spanish is almost Portuguese!" and reran the program. My grandfather, with a working knowledge of Spanish developed selling along the Gulf Coast (as well as other aptitudes) bubbled to the top of the list of candidates. Before he knew it, he received orders to wrap up his training and immediately ship south to Sao Paulo to begin training Brazilian soldiers.

He served there uneventfully for months. But by late 1944, the Allied military felt certain about victory.  At that point the idea was no longer to train more troops but instead get every able-bodied soldier to the frontlines. The operation in Brazil stopped and in Spring 1945 my grandfather found himself leaving New York with hundreds of fresh soldiers, sailing off to Europe

He never finished that particular trip. The transport ran into engine trouble two days into the voyage and received orders to return to New York. The day after the engine mishap, Germany surrendered.

So the next day, a ship full of troops pulls into New York harbor, and somehow the erroneous news spread that these soldiers were the first wave of triumphant veterans from Europe. My grandfather said his platoon spent the next few days being celebrated, paraded and feted all about the Big Apple.

Eventually he made it to Europe to help reestablish order, but that part of his past wasn't near as exciting and not worth mentioning, he'd then tell me.

Should you believe this story? Not at all. My grandfather was a wonderful joker and loved a good story, veracity be damned. Regardless of your opinion, thank you for reading.

Sincerely ~ Adm. Wolff

Youthful influences

One facet driving this experiment is my belliphilia. This peculiar feeling is neither overwhelming nor universal, as anyone who knows my opinion regarding the Gulf Wars can attest. Rather, while growing up, several major influences converged to make me idolize World War Two, more precisely the history of the Pacific theatre.

The first movie I remember seeing on the silver screen was Star Wars. When that movie came out, it's like the whole world became obsessed with both the story and the storytelling. There were magazines, comic books, toys, radio plays, puzzle books, drinking glasses with character biographies and much more. Even The Price is Right had at least two showcase showdowns that mentioned the movie: one highlighting the cinematic career of Sir Alec Guinness, and another two-parter retelling the adventure with cars as spaceships and a washing machine gussied up to resemble R2-D2.

But the simultaneous publicity that I remember involved reading every newspaper article or watching every documentary about HOW the movie was made and the development of the special effects. I devoured every piece of information I could discover about Star Wars. Time and again in interviews, Lucas and Dykstra would discuss how the climactic dogfighting scenes over the Death Star were based on footage of actual aerial combat from WWII. Maybe their point was how cool are these effects and the story they got to tell. I kept thinking how cool are dogfights.

Between Star Wars and Empire, I discovered Star Blazers early on Saturday mornings, before the official Big Three networks started their cartoons at 8 AM. The continuing storyline captured my attention and built tension (the constant count of how many days were left to save Earth being a major factor). I did not understand the broader issues of post-colonialism or the blow taken by Japan's collective psyche by the massive destruction wrought by the atomic blasts that ended the Second World War. The challenge to rescue the planet by uniting the best & brightest adventurers spoke to something in me as a young boy. Battle of the Planets came out in the United States around the same time, but that shows episodic format never grabbed me. (Even to my young sensibilities, the weird 7-Zark-7 interludes seemed strangely disconnected from the rest of the adventure; maybe subconsciously I felt I was being pandered to.)

I grew up in Virginia Beach, VA, with F14 Tomcats flying constantly overhead. While not a military brat, most of my friends were (meaning I'd lose touch with them after two years) and my father worked as a Navy contractor with a company that designed weapons systems for cruisers, battleships & destroyers. As a family we'd regularly visit the launching of new warships from Newport News in whose development my father had a hand. I understood that my father built the modern successors to the battleships that sailed in WWII and I was so proud of my father

We also vacationed in Wilmington, NC, and visiting the USS North Carolina was a regular summer ritual along with July 4th fireworks. Between these fond memories and my father's vocation, these giant grey technological marvels became inextricably linked to patriotism.

Additionally (and you might not believe me) television used to have only a handful of channels. (I know it strains credulity - just go along with the idea for a bit.) In the post-Vietnam era, TV stations often ran/reran romanticized and sanitized views of warfare: The Rat Patrol, Black Sheep Squadron, even Hogan's Heroes. (Hogan's Heroes was the show that my dad liked that I could stay and watch even as a young kid. I've never revisited this show to avoid evaluating my opinion of my dad as the original arbiter of good taste.) Additionally, the cinematic fare (both on television or in theatres) reinforced a glorified version of war where the good & just won, the valiant died nobly, and the evil or cruel suffered in the end. While this youthful remembrance/understanding of the narratives was not completely accurate, classic movies like Dr. Strangelove, Tora, Tora, Tora, The Great Escape, Where Eagles Dare, Run Silent, Run Deep, Sink the Bismark, The Man who Never Was, The Longest Day, Von Ryan's Express, and Stalag 17 cemented my belliphilia. Contemporary films like The Final Countdown and Top Gun, while not as good as the earlier offerings, also helped establish my tastes. War was awesome and one of the best things America ever invented!

Both my grandfathers (who will get their own entries) served during WWII in the Army in widely different capacities. Their stories (and Grandfather Jones' constant gifts of C-Rations) reaffirmed my concept of war as good and necessary. If so many men (real and fictional) supported war, who was I to disagree?

Looking back today, I find it very strange that, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, I held such a positive view of war  Much of this naivete came crashing down when I upset more than one friends' father with my glib & worshipful attitude to war. I knew only one officer, an uncle in the Marines. He was the epitome of an officer: polished, physically impressive, and deft enough to produce half-dollars from the ears of credulous nephews and nieces. The vast majority of veterans I met as a teenager had served as ground troops, either drafted or enlisted because the draft was imminent. These men came back with horrible stories and a fierce reluctance to talk. Only if prodded (usually by a vocalized misconception on my part) would they relate their experiences. As a knowitall teen, getting dressed down for my ignorance produced anger and humiliation immediately, with introspection and understanding coming only much later.

In the short term, these discussions had the immediate impact of making me hate the military. During high school, I took the ASVAB because everybody in the Norfolk area took the ASVAB. I scored well enough on the test that the recruiter wanted me on a submarine pronto tending its reactor, and tried to sweeten the pot with a promise of a full ride to UPenn's engineering program after serving two tours (four years). I said no. As a rebellious teenager, I was learning what science had done to war, including some vague idea of what my father contributed, and I wanted no part.

Yet as I got older, I couldn't help watching movies like Full Metal Jacket or Raiders of the Lost Ark or reading Tom Clancy novels without feeling some nostalgia for war. My emotions towards armed conflict remain ambivalent to this day.

Wow, that's probably way more that I intended to share, and maybe it will help explain this meandering journey. Or maybe it will just prove that I'm a hypocrite. Regardless, I hope this essay has served to explain a portion of my formative experiences as this experiment continues.

Fair Seas ~ Adm. Wolff

Welcome to my experiment

What you are reading is the first public record of a mental experiment that has been running for over a decade. Recent events have moved this experiment into the realm of possibility. The final result might prove fruitless or even remain unknown within my lifetime. Nonetheless,

So this single step is to frontload a great deal of information about WHY this experiment has shifted into a new phase. Additionally, this description will hopefully highlight the learning process of bringing my nascent concepts to fruition. Finally, this journal can serves as a makeshift repository of various resources found as I continue this journey. Below are just a few sites I've been reading (and rereading) as I discuss this project in greater detail:

• World War II Photos (public domain)
• Women Airforce Service Pilots
• Japanese Post-War Reconstruction
• Japanese Coastline Survey
• The History of Rosie the Riveter
• "Rosie the Riveter" 1942 song
• Rosie the Riveter - Norman Rockwell's 1943 version
• Post-War US-Soviet Relations
• The Deep Influence of the A-Bomb on Anime & Magna

Anyhow, tempus fugit, so let me wrap up for now with the promise of swift return.

Au revoir ~ Adm. Wolff